Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

  Admonition from the Woolsack was rarely heard. Their lordships were too well behaved to bark and hiss at an opponent, and the political issues which embattled the House of Commons only a few yards away seemed to lose their virulence when brought into the House of Lords. Usually, even in session, the chamber was empty.

  * Placed in the House in the fourteenth century to proclaim the nation's wealth in the wool trade.

  "The cure for the House of Lords is to go and look at it," said the journalist Walter Bagehot. "In the ordinary transaction of business there are perhaps ten peers in the House, possibly only six; three is the quorum for transacting business. A few more may dawdle in or not dawdle in." Numerous peers never entered the House of Lords at all, preferring to live "an obscure and doubtless a useful existence on their country estates scattered through the length and breadth of England [where they] were locally familiar as landlords, magistrates and Lords Lieutenant." They came up to London only to bring out a daughter or occupy a seat at a coronation. If they went to the House of Lords, it was usually to look up a friend whom, unaccountably, they had not encountered at their club. David Lloyd George, the Radical Welshman who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in As-quith's Cabinet, dubbed these rustic noblemen Backwoodsmen.

  In 1906, the House of Lords retained a significant constitutional function: when a piece of hasty, ill-conceived legislation was passed by the Commons and forwarded to the Lords, their lordships had the power to veto it. In theory, this was supposed to exercise a wise restraint on the lower House. Rebuff in the Lords might lead to cooler reconsideration in the Commons. Or, by provoking the resignation of the government, it could bring on a new General Election in which the public would have an opportunity to express its view at the polls. To this power of rejection, there was one long-established exception: it was accepted that the House of Lords could not amend or reject any bill having to do with money. For 281 years, this understanding-unwritten like the rest of the British Constitution-had gone unchallenged. In fact, the huge party imbalance in the upper house made a farce of the Lords' supposed role as an impartial revisionary body. The permanent Unionist majority swept away any trace of impartiality. When the government was Conservative, bills arrived from the Commons and passed effortlessly through the Lords without amendment, and sometimes even without discussion. But when a Liberal government came to power, the House of Lords suddenly awakened to its duty to scrutinize, amend, and reject. This was the fate of Gladstone's Home Rule bills in 1884 and 1893. In the decade of rule by Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour, 1895-1905, the Lords had retreated into somnolence, their watchdog powers unrequired and unexercised. Then came the election results of January 1906. "We were all out hunting in Warwickshire when the final results of the election arrived," wrote one nobleman. Peers, greatly alarmed, turned up at the House of Lords to ask what they should do to help turn back the socialist tide. They were counseled not to worry; nation and empire were safe. The Liberal majority, it was explained, although formidable in the House of Commons, could do nothing in the face of the veto power of the House of Lords. Soon- the explanation continued-in a few more years at most-the country would return to its senses and, in the next General Election, return control of the Commons to the Unionist Party. In the meantime, Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne, respectively the leaders of the party in the Commons and the Lords, would wield the powers of the upper house to keep the country safe.

  It was this formidable pair, the former Prime Minister and his lieutenant, the former Foreign Secretary and maker of the Anglo-French Entente, who blocked the Liberal path to social reform. The two Conservative leaders did not act in secret. They did not need to. What they planned and did was constitutional and legal; in their view it was also patriotic and right. The new Liberal majority contained men who were professionals, from the middle class, possessing small means; some of the Labour M.P.'s had actually worked with their hands. To Lansdowne, who believed that "the man in the street is the most mischievous product of the age," a House of Commons composed of poor men and workingmen could not effectively govern the nation. Balfour agreed, and in Nottingham on January 15, 1906, the night of his own electoral defeat, he urged that it was the duty of everyone to see that "the great Unionist Party should still, whether in power or in opposition, control the destinies of this great Empire." From the beginning of the new Parliament, Balfour and Lansdowne worked together. In an exchange of letters in April 1906, they both used a military metaphor: "It is essential that the two wings of the army should work together…," Lansdowne wrote Balfour. Balfour agreed: "The Party in the two Houses shall not work as two separate armies but shall cooperate on a common plan of campaign." The campaign was to be ruthless, the power of the House of Lords to be applied nakedly and unashamedly. Liberal bills which challenged the status or wealth of the landed nobility, or their supporters or constituents, were to be slaughtered without mercy.

  The first victim was a Liberal Education Bill designed to remedy the grievances of the Nonconformists, who had provided massive electoral support to the Liberal cause. The Bill, which would have abolished teaching Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism in state-supported schools, stirred the wrath of High Church Tories in both the Commons and the Lords. Introduced early in April 1906, it emerged from the Commons in autumn and went up to the Lords. Lord Lansdowne, with Balfour's advice in his ear, knew how to deal with it. The Bill was allowed to pass its early readings, then was sent to committee, where it was so mutilated by amendments that it came out legislating the opposite of its original purpose. This mutant was returned to the Commons, where the government, horrified, refused even to consider the Lords' amendment and simply let it die. A quicker, less complicated fate met a Plural-Voting Bill, intended to repeal an ancient law which gave certain landowners holding property in different constituencies the right to vote in each. (One great nobleman thus empowered had the right to vote twelve times.) The Lords began to debate the bill, soon ran out of things to say, and killed it in an hour and a half. The only major piece of legislation allowed to pass the 1906 Parliament was a Trades Disputes Act, which exempted trade unions from legal actions for damages. The growing trade-union movement was expanding its political and economic power; sensing danger in direct repression, the Lords warily stood aside.

  Liberals were enraged by the massacre of their bills. The House of Lords had become, in Lloyd George's phrase, "not the watchdog of the Constitution, but Mr. Balfour's poodle." Campbell-Bannerman, expressing frustration at the end of the session, announced grimly, "The resources of the House of Commons are not exhausted and I say with conviction that a way must be found, and a way will be found, by which the will of the people, expressed through their elected representatives, will be made to prevail." In June 1907, the Commons resolved, 432 to 147, to curb the veto power of the House of Lords. Nevertheless, in the 1907 parliamentary session, the Lords destroyed or sterilized almost every Liberal bill. The only important legislation allowed to pass was Haldane's Army Reform Bill which, by making the Regular Army more efficient and creating the Territorial Army and a General Staff, all the while cutting £2 million from annual military expenditure, was difficult to oppose.

  In January 1908, as the Liberal government entered its third year, the party in the Commons and the country was losing patience. Virtually none of the legislation promised in the election had been enacted; everyone realized that none would be until something was done about the House of Lords. But what could be done? Any legislation designed to restrict the powers of the Lords would have to pass through the House of Lords. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister was ill (Campbell-Bannerman was to resign on April 3 and die on April 22), the government seemed ineffective, and the public was disgusted. The electorate-as Balfour had predicted-was beginning to swing back to the right. A series of Liberal by-election losses (seven seats over the year) were not enough to threaten the government's huge majority in the Commons, but they were a warning of what might happen in the next General Election.

  To
reverse this trend, in 1908 the Cabinet proposed two significant pieces of legislation: an Old-Age Pensions Bill and a Licensing Bill. The concept of pensions for the elderly had overwhelming support from the British working class, and enactment had been pledged by Liberal M.P.'s. The proposed plan was modest: any person seventy or older who did not have an income of more than ten shillings a week would receive a weekly pension of five shillings (seven shillings and sixpence for married couples). Recipients had to pass a character test; any person who "has habitually failed to work according to his ability, opportunity, and need, for the maintenance of himself and those legally dependent on him" was declared ineligible. To pre-empt interference by the Lords, the government invoked the argument that it was a finance bill to which amendments by the upper house were inadmissible. Their lordships grumbled but let it pass.

  In its treatment of the Licensing Bill, the House of Lords showed no such caution. Carefully framed, supported by a far wider section of the public than simply Liberal Nonconformists who believed passionately in temperance, the bill was intended to cut down the number of public drinking houses in neighborhoods which had too many. A fixed number of pubs, proportionate to local population, was established and a lengthy grace period of fourteen years granted in which to adjust to the appropriate number. Conservatives fell upon this bill with fury. It was described as a vindictive government intrusion on a traditional and honorable form of private enterprise. One peer, arguing that the number of public houses had no relationship to drunkenness, declared that he did not feel sleepier in his country house, where there were fifty bedrooms, than he did in his seaside villa, where there were only a dozen. Brewers threatened to withdraw their generous support of the Unionist Party if the bill became law. The King, endeavoring to protect the Lords from themselves, summoned Lord Lansdowne and urged that the upper house not be seen lining up on the side of intemperance. Lansdowne carried the plea to his fellow Unionist peers meeting informally in the drawing room of Lansdowne House on Berkeley Square. (There was no chamber in the Houses of Parliament large enough to accommodate this number except the House of Lords itself, which could not be used except for official-and recorded-debate.) Of two hundred peers present, all but twelve favored rejecting the bill. When it was formally brought before the House of Lords on November 24, the vote to reject was 272 to 96. The House, said Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, Lord Lansdowne's brother, gave it "a first class funeral. A great many noble lords have arrived who have not often honoured us with their presence." In announcing the results, the Liberal Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, declared that the Licensing Bill had not died that night in the House but already had been "slain by the stiletto in Berkeley Square."

  At the end of 1908, the Liberal Party seethed with frustration over the government's impotence and its apparent unwillingness to challenge the provocations of the upper house. News from by-elections continued to depress and it was generally felt that if an election were held, the Unionists would win by a majority of a hundred seats. The problem, as everyone realized, was that the Lords were exploiting the letter of the constitution while ignoring its spirit. Balfour, with only 147 Unionist members in the Commons, supported by five hundred Unionist peers, was restricting the exercise of government to a single party.

  One solution-provoking an immediate General Election- seemed to the government too full of risks. None of the bills rejected by the Lords was in itself persuasive enough to convince the country to make a basic constitutional change regarding the upper house. Another path suggested itself: the Lords could not amend a Finance Bill; during the passage of the Old-Age Pensions Bill, the majority of peers had made no attempt to conceal their hostility to the legislation, but when the Commons firmly announced that any upper house amendment to this money bill was constitutionally unacceptable, the Lords had backed down. Finance bills-a Budget Bill, specifically-seemed to offer a means of social advance for the Liberal government. Should the Lords attempt to block legislation, the Liberals saw a basic constitutional issue they could take to the country. The issue of Who Rules England? The Peers or the People? was something the public could understand.

  It was during the weeks early in 1909 when the Cabinet was deadlocked on the issue of four dreadnoughts or six in the Naval Estimates that David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, devised his 1909 budget. He approached his task with zest. With £8.7 million needed to fund the old-age pensions and £3.7 million required in the first year to pay for new dreadnoughts,* Lloyd George faced an immediate prospective deficit of £16 million. To raise the money, the Chancellor would be forced to increase revenue through new taxes. This prospect cheered him enormously.

  * Dreadnoughts cost roughly £1.5 million apiece; the eight authorized in 1909 eventually cost British taxpayers at least £12 million.

  "I shall have to rob somebody's hen roost," he said, "and I must consider where I can get most eggs and where I can get them easiest and where I shall be least punished." By April, the Chancellor had located a number of suitable hen roosts. Paying for the extra dreadnoughts-whose authorization he had strenuously opposed-offered considerable retributional pleasure; the Unionists who had shouted loudest for the additional battleships would now be taxed to pay for them. The other items on his tax list also could be counted on to agitate the country's Establishment. Better, he had calculated a way to overcome their opposition: all these measures, which included a healthy ingredient of social reform, could be wrapped into a finance bill, the annual budget, with which the Lords would tamper at their peril.

  Lloyd George introduced his historic budget before the House of Commons on April 29, 1909, one month after the conclusion of the censure debate on the Naval Estimates. He called it the "People's Budget" and said it was intended "to raise money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalor." The bill slashed at wealth and property in a variety of ways. The only new taxes which hit all classes were increased duties on alcohol and tobacco. Taxes on motor cars and gasoline fell on the upper classes and the affluent. Lloyd George hit back at the brewers who had helped kill the Licensing Bill by increasing the cost of liquor licenses for public houses. He graduated income taxes from ninepence per pound to one shilling and twopence per pound (from slightly under 4 percent to a little less than 6 percent). He imposed a "Super Tax" on all incomes over £3,000 per year and substantially increased death duties. What most enraged Conservatives was that the Chancellor inserted into the Finance Bill a Land Valuation Bill intended to prepare the way for new taxes on land. For the first time, all private land in England was to be appraised. This was perceived-as was intended-as an attack on the great landowners. It created a storm. The image of strangers tramping over ancient lands to assess their value in order to levy taxes threw English noblemen into a frenzy; if the Bill could not be defeated in the House of Commons, then it must and would be vetoed in the House of Lords.

  The long battle over the House of Lords evolved in two phases: the initial battle over the 1909 budget; then, overtaking and overshadowing the budget, the fundamental constitutional question as to whether the House of Lords should retain its power to overrule the House of Commons. As long as the issue was primarily financial,

  Lloyd George fought the government's case. Once the battle shifted onto constitutional grounds, the Prime Minister, Asquith, stepped forward to lead his party.

  The Chancellor was an eager, active, sometimes inflammatory spokesman. In Parliament and the country, he delivered speeches, "something between incomparable drama and a high class vaudeville act," which left his audiences "howling with alternate rage and laughter." The most famous was delivered on a summer evening at Limehouse in London's East End where, before an audience of four thousand Cockneys, he described the government's fight to pass the Old-Age Pensions Bill and the resistance of the nation's landlords and property owners. The highlight was his description of his visit to a coal mine:

  "We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain… The earth seeme
d to be straining, around us and above us, to crush us in. You could see the pit props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibers split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way and there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites, the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended, just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives that way. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords and say to them-'Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are very old… they are broken, they can earn no more. Won't you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?'-they scowl at us and we say-'Only a ha'penny, just a copper.' They say, 'You thieves!' And they turn their dogs on to us."

  Lloyd George embraced all peers, magnates, and landowners great and small in an inclusive, generic, derogatory term, "the dukes." Describing these landed noblemen to his audiences, for the most part workers and townspeople, he painted scenes of rustic barbarians who sat around rough tables before vast fireplaces in their castles, wearing coronets like the peers in Iolanthe, occasionally ordering their horses saddled so they could ride up to London and gleefully vote against Liberal bills. At Newcastle on October 9, the Chancellor was in good form. He had good news to work with: Conservatives had predicted that the introduction of his budget would depress the economy; in fact, it was healthy and rising. "Only one stock has gone down badly," he reported. "There has been a great slump in dukes." And no wonder: "A fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts and dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer." He turned to the issue of the Lords' veto: "The question will be asked 'Should 500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgement-the deliberate judgement-of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?' "